Some thoughts on civic health for 2014

Thus the ancient insight, as old as Plato, remained in effect: The soul and the polis reflect each other. Or, to put it in contemporary terms, consciousness creates the self, but that self is then the subject of society and government. If so, then the people must be constantly on guard to prevent government from attempting to remake the self and consciousness to the point of enlisting them in the government’s causes. Liberty requires conscious vigilance.

Yet now the elite actively employ every institution of government and culture to tear away the foundations of a civic society.

Thus, we now find ourselves at a place where almost every act regarded in the mid-20^th century as a vice is, by the opening of the 21^stcentury, considered a virtue. As gambling, obscenity, pornography, drugs, divorce, homosexuality, abortion and sneering disaffection became The New Virtue, government at all levels began to move in on the action, starting with casinos and currently involving, in several states and the District of Columbia, an officially approved and bureaucratically managed narcotics trade. 

To the main point of Washington’s Farewell Address, that virtue is the necessary restraint upon liberty and religion the best source of virtue, Tocqueville added that in America, uniquely, religion and liberty are compatible: Freedom sees religion as the cradle of its infancy and the divine source of its rights, while religion is the guardian and guarantee of the laws that preserve liberty. But at the same time, from the Puritans onward, American liberty has been endangered by the American “passion for regulation.” This, Tocqueville predicted, eventually would enable government to extend its arms over society as a whole, to cover its surface “with a network of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules through which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot clear a way.” 

Sound familiar?

There is a logic chain at work here, too: a lack of self-limitation on individual liberty will produce excess and coarseness; virtue will retreat and, as it does, hypocritical moralizing about society’s deficiencies will increase. Widening irresponsibility coupled with public pressure for behavior modification will mount and be acted upon by government. The consequential loss of liberty scarcely will be noticed by the mass of people now indulging themselves, as Tocqueville predicted, in the “small and vulgar pleasures with which they fill their souls.” We will not as a result be ruled by tyrants but by schoolmasters in suits with law degrees, and be consoled in the knowledge that we ourselves elected them.

To retain liberty, or by now to repossess it, Americans must re-educate themselves in what has been made of Burke’s precept: “Liberty must be limited in order to be possessed.” Walt Whitman re-formulated this as, “The shallow consider liberty a release from all law, from every constraint. The wise man sees in it, on the contrary, the potent Law of Laws.” Learning what liberty is and what it requires of us is the only bulwark, ultimately, against American decadence. Pay no heed to the determinists: The choice is ours to make.